Final answer:
Phonological awareness is the skill that involves recognizing and manipulating units of oral language, critical for literacy development. It includes understanding, language structures, semantics, and syntax, essential for reading, writing, and communication.
Step-by-step explanation:
The overarching skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language, such as parts of words, syllables, onsets, and rimes, is known as phonological awareness. This foundational literacy skill plays a crucial role in the development of reading and writing abilities. To demonstrate phonological awareness, one needs to recognize and use language structures effectively, which encompasses understanding grammar, punctuation, and spelling during the composition and revision of text.
Understanding language structure is vital in reading as well. While engaging with various texts, students are expected to identify relationships between ideas, discern patterns of organization, and comprehend the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements. This is essential for effective communication and critical thinking in diverse rhetorical and cultural contexts. More complex literacy skills also rely on the understanding of phonemes and morphemes, the smallest units of sound and meaning within a language, which form the basis of language grammar, semantics, and syntax.